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I gave my GMAT on Sept 23rd and got a mere 550 (Q47, V20) and a 6.0 in AWA. While my quant score is around my expected range, my verbal score was way less than what I used to get in the practice tests. I wrote all the free tests available and bought the MGMAT tests and finished 6 of them too. 550 was the score I got when I wrote the first practice test. By the end of my prep I had been getting 640 consistently on GMATprep and MGMAT too. My highest score on MGMAT was 680. In all the GMATprep tests my quant was in the 47-49 range and verbal was around 30. In the MGMAT tests, my quant was 43-44 consistently and verbal was 33-35 consistently.

20 in the verbal is the 20% percentile and I believe I do not fall in that range. I was expecting atleast 30 verbal in the real exam. I believe I screwed up in the SC portion as it has been my strong point during my preparation. CR was natural to me and I am worst at RC's. Most of the time more than 50% of my RC responses were wrong. Also, the MGMAT verbal is little different from the real test. I felt that in the MGMAT verbal, the SC errors were quite obvious unlike the GMAT exam verbal in which the errors are not obvious.

I was wondering whether my goal of reaching 35 in Verbal in a month's preparation is realistic? I want to see a score of more than 650 in the real GMAT. Any suggestions are appreciated.

I gave my GMAT on Sept 23rd and got a mere 550 (Q47, V20) and a 6.0 in AWA. While my quant score is around my expected range, my verbal score was way less than what I used to get in the practice tests. I wrote all the free tests available and bought the MGMAT tests and finished 6 of them too. 550 was the score I got when I wrote the first practice test. By the end of my prep I had been getting 640 consistently on GMATprep and MGMAT too. My highest score on MGMAT was 680. In all the GMATprep tests my quant was in the 47-49 range and verbal was around 30. In the MGMAT tests, my quant was 43-44 consistently and verbal was 33-35 consistently.

20 in the verbal is the 20% percentile and I believe I do not fall in that range. I was expecting atleast 30 verbal in the real exam. I believe I screwed up in the SC portion as it has been my strong point during my preparation. CR was natural to me and I am worst at RC's. Most of the time more than 50% of my RC responses were wrong. Also, the MGMAT verbal is little different from the real test. I felt that in the MGMAT verbal, the SC errors were quite obvious unlike the GMAT exam verbal in which the errors are not obvious.

I was wondering whether my goal of reaching 35 in Verbal in a month's preparation is realistic? I want to see a score of more than 650 in the real GMAT. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Considering that you got a 6.0 in AWA, I am quite sure that your language skills are not bad. That said, 20 is certainly a low score. My thought here is that you are good in English language but you are not very comfortable with the type of questions asked i.e. RC, CR and SC

RC - Mainly practice will help. Read properly the first time around and note the scope, tone, organization and purpose of the passage. Then go on to questions. Do not make errors in the specific detail questions since the answer is right in front of you. Go back to the passage to confirm if you have a doubt. The extra 10 seconds are worth it. Veritas has an RC book which has many 650+ passages. In fact, some of them are the hardest that you could see on GMAT. It also discusses the various types of questions that are asked. Not that you need to know that for the exam but it helps in familiarizing yourself with what they are trying to test in each question type. You can practice from that book if you have the time.

SC - Most people dislike it probably because it involves grammatical rules which we haven't touched for years now and also because we speak incorrectly. That said, the effort required to answer 70%-80% is not much. Most errors that appear on GMAT can be categorized - Agreement errors, Pronoun errors, Verb errors, Modifier errors etc. Learn to spot these quickly. Learning a list of rules doesn't help. Also, GMAT is focusing less and less on rules and more and more on logic e.g. above 700 level questions will often involve 'accuracy' errors i.e. grammatically an option is correct but it changes the meaning intended. We tend to overlook this error. So to improve SC, focus on the most common errors and make sure you know the correct usage. Then practice. OG12 has good questions to practice on. Go through the explanation of each and every option. Figure out why A, B, C and D are incorrect and why E is correct. For idioms, check out this post: http://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2011/09 ... rom-rumor/

CR - Very logical, very mathematical... It's no surprise that you do well in CR since you are strong in Quant. Again, there are some things which are very important to keep in mind, especially in 700+ questions. e.g. While working on Strengthen/ Weaken questions, focus on the conclusion of the argument. That is what you have to strengthen/weaken. Make sure that the option you pick strengthens/weakens your conclusion, not a premise of the argument. At the end of the day, every CR question comes down to some such detail. _________________

Thank you very much for the detailed evaluation. Your positive feedback made me even more determined to score good on verbal in my next attempt. Though I scored 20 on my real exam, I somehow feel that my range is around 28-30. I was wondering whether picking up my score to 35 in a month's preparation is realistic?